Rape kits ‘went shelved’ and backlogs built up
Although rape kits vary by state, what they all have in common that they’re invasive and take hours to complete.
In Michigan, the examination has 20 steps, including head-to-toe physical assessment, during which all trauma should be documented and photographed if the patient consents. The examiner, a specially trained nurse, must wear gloves and change them between each sample collection.
The kit, a 10-inch-by-6-inch white box, has separate combs for head and pubic hair, an envelope for her underwear or tampon, and vaginal, anal and oral swabs. There’s a separate kit for blood and urine samples.
The nurse asks about the victim’s medical history, the last time she urinated or defecated, what her attacker did to her. Has she showered or brushed her teeth? Was she vaginally, anally or orally raped? Or all three? There are diagrams as well. The answers written on carbon copy sheets and in Michigan, one copy goes to law enforcement, one copy is for the medical record and one is kept in the kit, which is sealed and ideally sent for testing.
However, untested rape kits in the tens of thousands have been identified in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles and Memphis.
Some cities have said a lack of funding contributed to these sometimes decades-old backlogs, but advocates and researchers have pushed back, saying that for decades rape cases have not been a priority for law enforcement.
“They had all sorts of ways of discounting it, so they would never even do an investigation,” said Rebecca Campbell, a Michigan State University researcher who studied Detroit’s backlog.
“We see that a lot in untested kits, that the victim wasn’t perceived to be the perfect victim and therefore wasn’t worth their institutional and their individual time, attention and resources to investigate,” she said.
“So they didn’t investigate and they didn’t test the kit, and it all went shelved.”
A study funded by the National Institute of Justice found that 18 percent of unsolved sexual assaults from more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies included DNA evidence that had not been sent for testing.
And researchers found that 40 percent of law enforcement didn’t send evidence for DNA testing because, among other reasons, they hadn’t identified a suspect whose DNA they could test against the samples in the rape kit. This failure to test samples unless a suspect was already identified led researchers to conclude that some law enforcement agencies don’t fully understand the value of DNA evidence in rape cases. Contact Matt Mencarini at (517) 2671347 or mmencarini@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Mattmencarini.